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Saturday, 8 February 2014

Sprue Cutters Union 27: Photo Finish

While our hobby is mostly about building and painting models, a big aspect of it is showing off our creations. If you have a blog or just post pictures on a forum, you need a way to capture your model on film. How much effort do we put into this?

- Show us your photo studio! -

Well, this is going to be an embarassingly simple post. I own a simple digital camera : a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ30. I take most pictures where I work, so that can be the workbench or the dining room table.

I'm not much of a photographer, but I take dozens of pictures from slightly different angles and then just take the best one(s) to post online. I've learned not to use flash too much, that daylight is much better than artificial light, that pictures on a black cutting mat or my bright-white workbench tend to be hard to get right. The best ones are on the wooden dining room or the matt-white wall next to my computer desk.

The camera has a "food"-setting, which has a better macro-setting than the normal macro and a less bright flash. This is the setting I use most often to take detail pictures of certain parts.

I *COULD* invest some time in getting to know my camera better, because I'm certain it has the ability to control many settings, but most of the time I just can't be bothered and the pictures are "good enough". You''ll see me apologizing for picture quality sometimes, but I rarely go back to make better ones.
I do tend to apologize too much in general, for which I am sorry. (See what I did there?)

EDIT (March 15): I did take Motorsport Modellers' advice and made a first attempt to make a photobooth to take better pictures. Read about it here.

3 comments:

I am sorry for the late reply.....Oh now your making me to do it too.....lolNice to see someone else just gets the camera and uses it, we are men and we don't need to read instructions....Jeroen have a look at my post and you might like to make up a light box it will make life easy for you.Cheers mate,Shayne